Tom Watson

The Booklist: Eric Ambler's Noir

It's an addiction that I've never really fought, never even tried to battle in any sort of therapeutic way. I just give in and float downstream, and collateral continues to build. It's books, really. Piles of them. Dusty and finished and sitting by the bed, or in the small home office, or beside my chair in the living room. A dirty habit, if dust mites measure the effects of habituation. And it's an addiction that has me considering a methadone-like therapy this joyous holiday in the form a Kindle or a Nook or similar "e-reader" as these machines are known. (Recommendations welcome).

No, the piles must be reduced or I face a middle-aged future not all that dissimilar from the Collyer brothers, though I do get out quite a bit and the piles are only thigh-high at their worst. However, before the physical expulsion of allergen-filled material from my bed-chamber, some intellectual exercise may also prove beneficial and I find I am called upon to share my thoughts on reading with the readers of this wayward blog, book-list hungry hordes that you are. So in recognition of the shopping demands (personal and otherwise) of the above-mentioned joyous holiday season - or JHS™ - I've decided on a series of irregular posts on the books I can safely recommend from the past year's reading.

At the top of the stack lie four or five paperback reissues from the canon of Eric Ambler. Now, this choice should carry a bit of foreshadowing against future entries in the series: I fairly wallowed in detective and espionage noir this last year; I needed escape - or at minimum, brief transportation - from the difficulties of worry and creeping despair (I suspect I'm not alone in this) and what better way outside a pill bottle than dark mayhem in the alleys of, oh say, wartime London or the salons of Istanbul. There's a reason so many video games feature the thrill of machine-gunning vast squads of Nazi thugs - it brings such good cheer.

In any case, if you need an escape hatch from the sparkly holiday lights proclaiming "shop, for you must be happy!" then Ambler's the man for you - or that reader on your list.

Early this year, I read Ambler's best-known novel, his 1939 A Coffin for Dimitrios, later made into a film starring Peter Lorre. It features what became Ambler's favorite plot device - the innocent traveler caught in a web of espionage or crime. The writing is straightforward and the characters and settings always serve the plot. Ambler will sometimes allow some of his protagonists' inner struggles and fears to surface, but he also keeps things moving. Sometimes the reader understand more of the situation than the hapless, bumbling traveler - but sometimes the innocent improves his thinking and surges ahead, while the writer holds back the deduction. Ambler, an Englishman who died in 1998, inspired a generation of noteworthy noir writers, including Philip Kerr and Alan Furst.

This summer, I went  on an Ambler tear, plowing through Epitaph for a Spy, Journey of Fear, and The Schirmer Inheritance - visiting the south of France, Parish, Istanbul, Italy and Greece with a collection of unknowing Englishmen, shadowy assassins, bluster police officials, assorted femmes fatales and the odd ex-Nazi.

There is always a moment  in the Ambler novels when the dupe - a novelist, a salesman, a teacher and the like - realizes with sinking fear that they're not in a movie or an Agatha Christie tale; that the danger is real and outlook fairly grim. It seems formulaic (and it is ) but Ambler had the rare gift of lifting such tales with his spare writing. Here's that moment from A Coffin for Dimitrios:

Besides, here was real murder; not neat, tidy book-murder with corpse and clues and suspects and hangman, but murder over which a chief of police shrugged his shoulders, wiped his hands and consigned the stinking victim to a coffin. Yes, that was it. It was real. Dimitrios was or had been real. Here were no strutting paper figures, but tangible evocative men and women, as real as Proudhon, Montesquieu and Rosa Luxemburg.

Ambler was born in London in 1909 to music hall musicians and actors, and toured Europe quite a bit as a child. He uses those experiences well, and began his novels at a propitious time: as fascism was descending on the continent like acid rain. John LeCarre once referred to Ambler as 'the source on which we all draw' but I wasn't after the roots of literary noir when I fished out his novels - I was looking for a good read, and if I'm honest, a hide-away from these times. Ambler put me on a tramp steamer in an unfriendly port or on the overnight train across the Alps - and in a better place entirely.

Note: Here's the Amazon link. I particularly like the Vintage paperback covers.

What Your Facebook Page Says About Who You 'Really' Are

It's becoming increasingly common to "meet" someone online before you encounter them in real life. In my experience, people I meet online are generally quite recognizable when I finally get together with them at a conference or physical meeting. But maybe I'm just lucky.

via scienceblogs.com

A fascinating study by Max Weisbuch, Zorana Ivcevic, and Nalini Ambady shows that - in large part - we really are who we pose as on Facebook. The article's from Cognitive Daily. I do think we tend to present a idealized version of ourselves - the cool side of our lives we want everyone to perceive as us. But then again, we also do that in face-to-face relationships, don't we?

Now Be Thankful

Some hippie-dippy British trad-rock Celtic goodness circa 1970 from Fairport Convention on this Thanksgiving Day, 2009 - written by Dave Swarbick and Richard Thompson - somehow seems fitting in the pre-turkey mists of morning.

When the stone is grown too cold to kneel
In crystal waters I'll be bound
Cold as stone, weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

Fired Up - Ready to Go on Climate Change?

That President Obama will travel, after all, to Copenhagen next month to take part in the United Nations climate change conference is huge news in my house - or at least, in my daughter's high school environmental activism club.

There are those who argue that the U.S., even with a Democratic President and Congress, is not ready to come in from the cold on climate change in a formal manner, that the Obama Administration has moved too slowly in joining international action. But the actions of the President speak loudly, particularly to young activists who very often drive this issue with more passion than their political professional elders.

So Obama's trip to Copenhagen, where he will speak at the beginning of the conference and then zip over to Oslo to collect his Nobel, is important to the environmental movement in the U.S. I know that I was hearing a bit of "why should we bother?" after a long day of telephone-banking to Congressional offices - but that was when the young activists believed the Administration would skip Copenhagen.

Welcome too is the small bit of policy the President will bring with him: "a tentative promise to reduce production of climate-altering gases," the first time the U.S. has ever entered in the arena of concrete emission numbers. According to John Broder in the Times, Obama "will tell the delegates to the climate conference that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said. No American administration has ever delivered even a tentative pledge on emissions reductions because Congress has never enacted climate legislation or approved an international global warming agreement with binding emissions targets."

But the White House is doing something else as well: firing up the portion of the activist base that spends long afternoons calling Congress about climate change.

The New Good Guys - Murdoch and Microsoft

...Until we develop peer-to-peer currencies or come up with some other idea, we must pit the corporations who would exploit us against one another. By surrendering to just one publicly held company—no matter how little evil it says it wants to do—we doom ourselves to working for free.

via www.thedailybeast.com

Doug Rushkoff is right about this: Google is on its way to being the gatekeeper to the Internet - which should be the province of no single company. If Murdoch and Microsoft can shake things up by trying to route around Google, that's a good thing. I admire Google's products and use them every day - indeed my small consulting company essentially "runs on Google" - but I think some competition and some new models are crucial.

Rock-and-Roll Data: Those Audio Lists

I use a lot of music web services but I don't like to invest in this sector. Nonetheless, it's an area that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I've written endlessly on this blog about the music web services I use, why I use them, and where I think the music web is going.

The most interesting music web service to me has been audioscrobbler (aka last.fm). I'm not all that interested in last.fm as a social network, but I am obsessed with it's value as a data asset. I report all my music listens to last.fm via the audioscrobbler technology and it has built a deep data asset on my musical listening habits (and therefore musical taste).

via www.avc.com

I use audioscrobbler too, but not as deeply as Fred Wilson
, one of the best tech bloggers around. If you look on the lower right-hand side of my blog layout, you'll see a chart that's tied to the last.fm API - click on the blue arrows and you can scroll through the recent faves (the ones I've listened to via iTunes and on my iPod , anyway). Warning: acres of classic rock.

Ponte Vecchio Shutters

Ponte Vecchio shutters, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

Another picture from my brief Florence sojourn - this probably the most-photographed structure in town: the Ponte Vecchio. This shot is a view of the back windows of the gold shops and tiny apartments above the Arno. It was early, so the light was terrific. The bridge dates to 1345 and was famously spared by the retreating German Army in 1944, when all the other Arno bridges were destroyed.

James K. Galbraith: Old Mistakes Die Hard

I'm tempted to say that the United States is plainly unable to cope with the economic crisis in a serious way. The barriers are philosophical, procedural, and constitutional. So long as economic thinking is mired in a world that disappeared with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, so long as any action requires 60 Senate votes, and so long as political capital erodes from the start of a fixed four-year presidential term, we're stuck.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

It's been pretty clear for a while that the U.S. needs a major jobs program, that unemployment will linger (or worsen) for years, but 'business reporting' in this country isn't up to the standards of TMZ.com - and we seem to lack the political will. James Galbraith almost throws in the towel in this rant, and he jabs both the President and Congress for their Wall Street ways.

Maud Newton's life - a novel, not a memoir

I guess it's not surprising, in the Oprah era, that so many other people had the same idea. Nowadays bookstores are overrun with narratives that could be sold under exactly the title that so appealed to my adolescent self. It's hard to dispute writer Ben Yagoda's assertion that the memoir has become the "central form" of this cultural moment. Whether it has, as he also contends, supplanted fiction remains to be seen.

But I hope he's wrong.

via www.latimes.com

Maud writes in the LA Times about how real people and events have "morphed in incremental but ultimately fundamental ways" in her upcoming novel, which we will promote heavily herein. On the downside, Ms. Newton's must-read literary headquarters has been hacked again the forces of Sauron. But we hear there a wily code wizards working on it (though we remain puzzled, both about our over-use of first-person plural and the sudden Tolkien metaphors).

Dennis Perrin on Anvil: Eon Flux

Wow. What a film. What a story. I became so emotionally involved that I had to stop the film, my heart was breaking so deeply. Any artist who's experienced positive audience reaction, who has felt that electric buzz when it all lines up and flows can appreciate what Lips and his best friend/bandmate Robb Reiner still crave as they enter their fifties. These two have never given up, and remain committed to their original vision, forged in their teens. Inspiring, moving, gut wrenching. My friends were right: I completely identified with Anvil.

via dennisperrin.blogspot.com

Our blogging buddy Dennis Perrin as a great review of Anvil up. I have to see this. Also good news: Dennis plans to return to stand-up comedy in NYC. When we learn the details, we'll pass them along here. Meanwhile, his videos are almost always dark and sometimes hilarious.